Winter Flower Read online

  Whatever.

  I closed and locked my door.

  I opened the game back up, my avatar bouncing back into position. I got lucky this time … usually when someone left their avatar idle in the sim, the GMs—Game Masters—would bounce them out. I hadn’t been gone long enough for anyone to notice. I continued my walk. On my left was the large hill that overlooked the harbor. On top was the Cathedral, home to the Twilight, one of the less savory factions, and the base for the current Mayor, who I’d long since determined was a sadistic lunatic. Past the Cathedral was the Brigade headquarters. Beyond that, the warehouse district, where it wasn’t safe for humans to go.

  The Brigade headquarters was a two-story building that might have once been a fire station. It had a pole from the second floor anyway. The basement had been converted to jail cells. In theory, the Mayor was responsible for public safety in Erie, but in practice the Brigade did the job. Vigilantes: violent and effective.

  I had joined the Brigade about three months earlier. I was new to Erie and was picked up by the faction fairly quickly. After about a month I’d been promoted to sergeant.

  Of course, in Second Life, three months is more like two years.

  When I walked into the Brigade headquarters, Lilya was standing there talking with a human male. He was tall, possibly close to seven feet, and well-built with tattoos banded around his upper arms. He had short, shaggy blond hair, and his face showed a five o’clock shadow. A name floated over his head: Gunstock Valor.

  Lilya: Tamara. I’m so glad you’re here. This is Gunstock. Gunstock, this is Tamara, our training sergeant.

  I reached for my keyboard, hesitated for a second, then typed: Is Gunstock a recruit?

  Lilya: Yes. Can you show him the ropes? I’ve reached the end of my shift.

  Lilya: /ooc I have to log off now, it’s past midnight here.

  The characters /ooc meant “out of character.” Players typed that when they needed to communicate something that wasn’t actually part of the game.

  Tamara: /ooc: have a great night, Lilya!

  Lilya: /ooc: good night, sweetie! Take good care of Gunstock!

  Time to get back into character.

  Tamara: It’s nice to meet you, Gunstock. I’m Tamara.

  Gunstock: Charmed, Miss Tamara. I wouldn’t have guessed such a pretty lady would be the training sergeant for an organization like this. Have you been with the Brigade long?

  I felt my cheeks heat up. I ignored that and began typing: Not long. I’m just very good at what I do.

  Gunstock: I can imagine.

  I led Gunstock out of the headquarters and along the edges of the warehouse district. As we walked, we didn’t chat. In some simulators, voice chat was preferred, but it was disabled here. That made it impossible to talk while maneuvering an avatar. However, it was one of the reasons I liked to play here. When I was online, I preferred to completely put on the role of Tamara. No one in Second Life knew that I was physically male in real life. I was happy to keep it that way. As soon as people knew that, they would begin to treat me differently. And the thing was? In this world, I felt needed. Valued. Confident. In the real world I felt none of those things.

  Over the next hour, we stopped in at several locations on the island … the bar, the hotel, the hospital. During that time, out of character, I learned that Gunstock had only been in Second Life for about a month. That was what I had suspected. This was the first roleplay sim he had visited. I explained the rules the best I could, emphasizing that the point was to become immersed in the story, not to get points or achieve a particular end. He seemed to understand.

  We were about to find out if he got it. As we left the hospital, we came upon a small grouping of figures.

  It was Mayor Kacklick Fromwell, with his assistant Sophie. They were confronting a young woman. The label floating over her head read Ninevah Marvel.

  Kacklick was tall and extremely thin and wore a long black overcoat which probably hid serious weapons. He had long sideburns, and black leather boots, and what appeared to be leather pants. He wore a red amulet at his neck. I’d often seen him around over the past three months, and the amulet was new and probably trouble.

  Avatars didn’t actually have facial expressions except the crudest ones. But somehow Fromwell managed to be menacing without them. He turned to face me.

  Kacklick Fromwell: Tamara. Butting into other people’s business, as usual?

  Jerk. I typed: Just doing my job.

  I turned to the girl and typed: Hi. I’m Sergeant Tamara, I’m with the Brigade, we’re kind of like the cops around here. Are you new?

  The girl took a long time to respond. I found myself checking the clock. I needed to get to bed soon. School in the morning. Finally, she answered.

  Ninevah Marvel: *whispers* help me

  Whoa. I took a step back from Fromwell. Then I typed: Gunstock, step back a little bit please? Cover me. Mayor, what kind of game are you playing?

  I watched the Mayor closely, even as Sophie backed away from our little tableau, apparently keeping her eyes on Gunstock. If it came down to a fight, I was in trouble. Gunstock was inexperienced, and Sophie deadly. She’d probably take him out in a matter of seconds. I was good, but Fromwell was far more powerful than I was, probably level twenty or higher. He had all the advantages. All the same, I couldn’t walk away from this fight.

  A private chat window popped up in the corner of my screen. It was Gunstock: What do I do

  In the chat window I typed: Follow my lead. If a fight starts, try to take out Sophie with your guns.

  Gunstock: *gulps* I don’t know how to use them.

  Tamara: Just do the best you can.

  After what seemed like an eternity, Fromwell typed: Sergeant Tamara, Young Nineveh here is mine.

  Tamara: Nineveh … get behind me, then run. I’ve got this son of a bitch.

  As I finished typing this sentence, I drew my weapons. I could feel adrenaline hitting my real life body … I’d never fought the Mayor, but I’d seen him take out high-level players in seconds. As far as I knew, he was the longest standing player on the island.

  Fromwell typed: The Mayor begins to laugh with a menacing tone, then raises his arms in the air. A black cloud begins to form between his hands.

  As the words appeared on the screen, his avatar went into a crouch, arms waving in the air and a black cloud began to surround him.

  Crap. Magic.

  I jumped high in the air, backwards, hoping to get out of range of the spell as I opened fire with my pistol. Before I hit the ground, the heads-up display showed my hit points beginning to drop. Tiny animated blood-red particles floated away from my body as I hit the ground running. My hit points were dropping fast, and there was no chance of me taking him out with a pistol in that time. I charged forward swinging my weapon.

  Another spell: a bright flash of light extended beyond Fromwell’s body, enveloping me. I heard the sound of thunder, and a scream. My avatar dropped to the ground.

  Words appeared on the bottom of the screen. Tamara Goldwyn has been defeated by Kacklick Fromwell! Tamara Goldwyn loses 40xp!

  Damn.

  I was immobilized and would remain that way for several minutes. The rules said that once you were defeated, you couldn’t reengage. Gunstock was also down. We were through.

  Fromwell typed: Nineveh, girl … come with us.

  The girl approached the Mayor. He turned back toward me and typed: No one will question your courage, Tamara, but one must know how to pick the right battles to fight. When you’ve recovered, you should consider whether or not the Brigade is the right home for you. We could train you to really fight. And to do other things.

  I shuddered.

  Tamara: I’d never join you.

  Fromwell: Then I suppose you’re doomed to misery and failure. You and all your allies.

  Fromwell, Sophie, and Nineveh walked away.

  I sighed and looked at the clock. I needed to get to bed. It seemed like whenever
I played, hours could race by without me noticing.

  Tamara: /ooc: I’m out of time for the night. You coming back tomorrow?

  Gunstock: /ooc: yeah, this was a lot of fun. See you tomorrow.

  I logged out, finding myself, with what felt like a shock, back in my bedroom. I was back in a place where I wasn’t a leader; where I was not heroic, not needed, not a woman.

  The room was quiet, and through the door I could hear the ticking of Mom’s grandfather clock, and from outside, the underlying hum of thousands of insects. But inside, I was reliving the battle. I turned off my computer, turned out the light, and crawled into bed.

  I felt empty, so I turned my mind back to the game. Lilya would be upset we’d lost the battle with the Mayor, but I didn’t think she’d be mad about us intervening. That was what we did. Protected the innocent. Searched for the missing. Took care of those who couldn’t take care of themselves.

  In my virtual world, I was all the things I couldn’t be in the real world.

  I drifted off to sleep and dreamt about the island. In my dream, Brenna was there with me.

  Erin

  When Sam said the words, “you motherfucker,” I almost got up. He was locked in his room, of course, and it was late, and that meant instead of sleeping, he was playing on his computer. Again.

  It was almost midnight, and I couldn’t imagine what could have caused that outburst. But I knew that he wouldn’t welcome my intrusion. What was the right thing to do? Lori and I had talked about it a lot, at least once we started talking again. How much freedom did you allow them? Obviously we allowed Brenna too much freedom. She’d not been like Sam though. Brenna had a very active social life, always out with friends.

  Except for whoever he played that game with, it seemed like Sam had no friends at all. When he told us at dinner that he had made friends with a girl named Hayley, I almost didn’t believe him. I still wasn’t sure I believed him.

  My head was muddled, and I was too tired to get up from the couch and go back to the bedroom. Too tired … bullshit. I just didn’t want to sleep next to Cole anymore. And so I drifted off to sleep on the couch, the shifting images on the television illuminating the ceiling in shifting patterns of blue and black.

  My transition to dreaming was smooth and unnoticeable. Almost without warning, I was standing in our old living room when the knock came on the door. It was almost sunset when we opened the door and found Detective Hunt standing there with another man, Stan Wilcox. I didn’t know his name then, but in the dream I did for some reason.

  In the dream Hunt always said, “Mrs. Roberts, do you recognize this?”

  A thousand times he’d held up the plastic bag to show me the iPhone, in its case with the custom Black Flag logo. Who listened to Black Flag anymore? Cole and Brenna did. He’d had the case made for her fifteenth birthday. The phone was cracked, the screen crushed. I staggered when he showed it to me. Cole caught me from behind.

  The men came in. In the dream they always shouted. “Why did you let her go?” “Why did you give her a car?” “It’s your fault!” Stan Wilcox, the FBI agent, and Hunt, they circled around me.

  Hunt sweating, contempt in his voice. “Your daughter wouldn’t have run away if you had been a better mother.”

  Somehow Angela was beside me. “I tried to warn you. Of course she was hanging out with older guys … her father betrayed his family. You should have left Cole when he cheated.”

  Stan Wilcox said, “Almost three hundred thousand children in the United States are at risk of being trafficked.”

  Hunt replied, “Because their parents let them go without supervision.”

  Wilcox said, “You’re saying they need better mothers.”

  Cole’s mother Virginia appeared. A crooked line appearing between her brows, she stuck her finger in my face. “If you’d listened to me, this would never have happened.”

  Hunt said, “It’s her fault. Look at her.” The disgust in his tone made my stomach cramp.

  The phone! The phone! They found it at four in the afternoon, after they’d refused to consider it an abduction all day. They found her car abandoned in a parking lot in Winchester, her phone crushed on the ground next to the car.

  Where is my daughter? I screamed it at the two men.

  Cole sat there on the other side of the room, inert, stunned. Guilty. Ineffectual. Impotent.

  Where is she? I cried.

  Hunt shrugged. “It doesn’t look good.”

  Wilcox said, “We’ll find her, Mrs. Roberts. But she won’t be your child anymore.”

  Stop, I cried weakly. We drove. Cole wasn’t with us. I sat in the front with Wilcox and we drove up and down the highway, looking at the young girls prostituting themselves on the Internet. Here, a fifteen-year-old. The caption, somehow floating above her in the air, read, I’m your fantasy. $300 / hr. There, a twelve-year-old, with a bruise on her cheek. Across the street, a girl that looked like Brenna but wasn’t Brenna. A thousand girls up and down each side of the street, each dressed more provocatively like the last. The highway had somehow transformed itself into an endless webpage, overflowing with trauma and grief.

  One of the girls cried out, “Mama!”

  Virginia muttered, “Whores.”

  I couldn’t make Brenna out in the crowd. And Stan kept driving.

  “Stop,” I said. “I need to get out and look for her.”

  “We’ll find her,” he said. “But you have to understand, I’m working all of these cases.”

  “All of them? All of these girls?” I waved my hand out the window. The faces had become a blur, because he was speeding now.

  “Of course.”

  Help.

  The words came out in a whimper. But it wasn’t one of the girls.

  It was me.

  Five

  Cole

  I struggled to open my eyes and reached out, slamming my hand into the alarm clock, then sat up in the bed. It was 5:30 a.m. Pitch-dark outside, pitch-dark in my bedroom. Slowly, my eyes adjusted, and I saw that Erin had never come to bed. She was most likely asleep on the couch. Lately that had been pretty common.

  I stood up and stumbled to the closet and got out a uniform. My suits hung in the back of the closet to the right, more or less out of reach. I hadn’t worn one in months. Shower and shave, and by six I was ready to go.

  I knocked on Sam’s door, and when there was no response, knocked again. Finally, I heard a groan, and the door cracked open. Bleary-eyed, Sam looked out at me.

  “School, kiddo. Time to get up.”

  No answer; instead, Sam nodded and wandered toward the bathroom. I walked through the living room without turning on the light. Erin was asleep on the couch, a blanket wrapped around her. I paused for a moment, looking down at her. Asleep on her side, facing the television, she looked younger. Almost like the girl I’d fallen in love with so long ago. I gave a tired sigh, and went into the kitchen and filled a travel mug with coffee.

  Outside, I walked past Erin’s Mercedes, which we’d managed to keep only because it was already fully paid for, and over to my car. It was muggy as hell. A warm, unpleasant breeze blew through my uncomfortably short hair. The house we were renting was a one-story, two-bedroom ranch house. Stained carpet, and one of the front windows was cracked and sealed with duct tape. I needed to cut the grass. When we did the math on what the new job was going to pay, minus living expenses, gas, and health insurance, this was the only option. It wasn’t the worst neighborhood in Oxford, and it was zoned to a decent high school, which was important. But the entire thing would have fit in our old living room in Fairfax.

  I got in the car. There was no point in dwelling on that. Our lives weren’t what they had been. Now it was all about surviving, day to day. Somehow I didn’t think we were even going to need this much for much longer. Our marriage was utterly wrecked, and as I drove away, I reflected on the fact that the only reason we were still together was Sam and economic necessity. Seriously. If I left, where was I
going to go? I could barely afford the rent on this crappy house as it was, much less a hotel room. And Erin wasn’t exactly in a position to support herself. Bachelor’s degree in economics or not, it had been twenty years since she’d held down a job. And she never missed an opportunity to remind me that it was my fault.

  Not to mention, if I left, what about Sam? Would Sam end up staying with his mother? Would that be any good for him? She drank way too much and didn’t have a job and Sam was already oddly effeminate. Not that there was anything wrong with that, it’s just who he was. But—well, I often thought Sam needed to toughen up. We could go live with my parents, I guess. Dad had warmed up a lot over the years, but Mom was a piece of work. Not to mention that the court wasn’t just going to let me up and move. I’d been lucky they let me transfer my probation to Alabama in the first place.

  For the ten thousandth time, I thought, Maybe I should ask Daddy for help. Except the one time, when we put up the award for information about Brenna, I’d never asked him for a handout. Not once. I didn’t want to start. I could picture what it would be like. He’d do it begrudgingly, but would offer a loan. Disapproving. My mother would charge her own form of interest by nosing in where she wasn’t wanted, demanding to know how the money was spent and trying to dictate our lives and push us around, just like she pushed Daddy around.

  I wasn’t ready for that.

  Fifteen minutes after leaving the house I parked behind the restaurant. The sun was just beginning to lighten the sky. I took a walk all the way around the building. Linda hadn’t swept the parking lot yet, and cigarette butts and garbage scattered the lot.

  The building itself was shaped roughly like a shoe box. Old brown brick, dark brown metal panels and glass. Inside, Linda and Dakota were sitting next to each other at the counter talking. I walked in the restaurant. The floor was dirty, and so were the bathrooms.

  Without a word, I walked to the register, turned the key, and checked sales. One hundred ten dollars. I raised my eyebrows, then turned to Linda and Dakota.